SHALL WE FIND OUR SALVATION SITTING, LIKE MR. MELLON, ON A PILE OF
DOLLARS
The conditions which face Mr. Harding are like those which face the
administrator of a corporation left by its old head and creator to the
direction of an incompetent son. The young man is the nominal master of
the business. He lacks confidence in himself and what is worse still his
wife and mother lack confidence in him. They have fortified him with a
brother-in-law as a right hand man. His brother-in-law knows little of
the business and can never forget that he is the creature of his sister
and her mother-in-law.
The administrator of this corporation wishes to obtain a decision upon
policy. The proprieties require him to consult its nominal head. The
young man, unsure of himself, must talk it over with the mentor whom his
wife and mother have provided. He in turn proves no final authority but
must discuss the question with his sister. Ultimately the widow who owns
most of the stock must be approached. She hires others to run the
property, wonders why they do not run it. The very fact that the others
could reach no decision makes her cautious about reaching one herself.
The administrator goes vainly about this circle seeking for a "yes" or
"no."
The government was simple when the public had faith in the social
purposes of business and public opinion did not differ greatly from
business opinion. Parties reflected the will of business. Authority was
centered. Whether you said it resided in parties or in business or in
public opinion made little difference. There was substantial agreement.
A "yes" or "no" was easy.
Suppose Mr. Harding should be in doubt, as he is so often--today. He
asks himself what is party opinion, what is business opinion, what is
public opinion, or what is the opinion of some powerful minority which
may turn an election against him.
His party has no opinion; it exists by virtue of its capacity to think
nothing about everything and thus avoid dissensions. Business is of two
minds and is moreover afraid of the public. It will assume no
responsibility. Public opinion, what is it? Mr. Hearst's newspapers? Or
the rest of the press? Or the product of the propaganda conducted from
Washington? Or something that Mr. Harding may create himself if he will?
Minority opinion is definite, but is it safe? Where is authority?
A return to those happy days when authority did center somewhere, when
in conducting the business you did not have to run around the whole
circle seeing the young man, his wife, his brother-in-law, and the widow
who inherited the property, is our constant dream. Let us get back to
party government, exclaimed Mr. Harding; so the nation voted to do so,
only to find there were neither parties nor party government.
Let us, then, it is suggested, found some new party that will "stand for
something," that will synthesize in one social aim, the common element
in the aims of various interests into which the country is divided. But
no one can point out the common basis, the principle which the new party
shall advocate.
Let us then have a better informed public opinion. Mr. Walter Lippmann
in his new book upon the subject, despairing of the press, would put the
making of public opinion in the hands of experts, collecting the truth
with the impartiality of science.
We seek unity as perhaps the builders of Babel sought it after the
confusion of tongues fell upon them.
One favorite hope of attaining it is through a new synthesis of business
and politics. Government by business had worked. Let us return to Eden.
Let us elect a business man President. One may substitute for President
in this last sentence Governor or Mayor or Senator or Congressman, for
whatever the office is, this recipe is always suggested.
Thus, so it is piously hoped, we may get back to those good old times
before we builded for ourselves this Babel, a government that was
independent of business, parties that were independent of everything
under the sun, voters that were independent of parties, a press that was
independent, a propaganda that was independent, and blocs that knew no
rule but their own.
Elect the business man to office, so it is felt, and you will have an
important synthesis, an old and tried one, one that worked, business and
politics. You will do more. You will import into public life all that
wonderful efficiency which we read about in the _American Magazine_,
that will to power, that habit of getting things done, that instant
capacity for decision which we romantically associate with commercial
life. All this is in the minds of those who urge this method of
achieving unity.
We have no greater national illusion than the business man illusion. In
any other country a business man is just a business man; in America he
is a demigod. Golden words, as Mark Twain said, flow out of his mouth.
He performs miracles. He has erected a great industry and amassed a
large fortune. Therefore he would make a great public official. We never
think of him as merely a specialist having a narrow aptitude for heaping
up money.
The reasoning about the business man is this. Success, real success,
comes to the jack of all trades, a major premise handed down from
pioneer days. "A" is a real success, for he has made several millions.
Therefore "A" is a jack of all trades. Therefore he would be as great a
President as he is a shoe button manufacturer.
We owe the business-man illusion to the pioneers. In a few years they
subjected a continent to our uses. They accumulated for themselves
wealth such as the world had never seen. The nation does not think of
them as the luckiest of a generation facing such virgin resources as
existed on no other continent, at a moment when means of transportation
such as the world had never seen before, and machinery for manufacture
without parallel were in their hands. The marvelous element was not the
opportunity but the men.
One day they were telegraphers, day laborers, railroad section hands and
the next they were colossal figures of American enterprise. As their
like existed nowhere else they became the American type. They
established the tradition of American business.
It has been a tradition profitable to keep alive. The men who by luck,
by picking other men's wits, or by the possession of a special talent,
useful only in a society like our own, grow vastly rich, love to read
how wonderful they are. For their delectation a journalism has grown up
to celebrate the epic of their marvelous industry, resourcefulness,
efficiency, their god-like insight into the hearts of men; whose praises
they pay for liberally in the disposition of advertising. Young men who
would be great read this journalism diligently looking for the secret of
success. Reading it they resolve not to keep their minds upon five
o'clock when the closing whistle blows but to become rich by industry
and thrift like its great exemplars; who profit by it not only in having
their own praises sung but in getting more work out of their servants.
So much virtue rests upon the business-man illusion that no one would
lay an impious finger on it. I merely analyze it to exhibit the contents
of our minds when we say "elect a business man President," and to
present the picture of a demigod out of the _American Magazine_ in the
White House, and a new synthesis of business and politics.
Moreover, we let ourselves be misled by the habit of speaking of the
"public business" and accepting without examination the analogy which
the word suggests. We say to ourselves, "Well, since government is a
business, the proper person to be in charge of it is a business man."
But it is not business in any exact sense of the word. If the product of
the operation were a mere bookkeeping profit or even mere bookkeeping
economies then it might properly be called a business. But that which
business efficiency in office, if it could really be obtained, might do
well, is the least part of self-government, whose main end must for a
long time be the steady building up of the democratic ideal.
But the electing of business men to office does not build up this ideal.
On the contrary it is a confession of failure in democracy, an admission
that public life in it does not develop men fit for its tasks, that for
capacity it is necessary to seek in another world and summon an
outsider; establish a sort of receivership in self-government.
And it is a blind sort of receivership. We know little about business
men except the noisy disclosures of their press agents. "X" has made a
million dollars. If we no longer say, as in the days of Mark Twain, that
golden words flow from his mouth, we accept his wealth as proof positive
of his extraordinary capacity for affairs. There is no going behind the
fact of his vast accumulation, for business is conducted in secret. The
law recognizes that it has to be, keeping in confidence facts disclosed
through income tax returns.
When we consider a successful business man for office no allowance can
be made for the fact that the intelligence responsible for his success
may not have been his as head of a successful organization. In no way
may it be asked and answered whether all the original force which was in
him may not have been spent before he is suggested for office. Senator
Knox was an instance of spent force, his energy and ambition being gone
when he entered public life.
Luck may explain a commercial career and you cannot elect luck to
office. Special talents which are valuable in making money may be out of
place in political life.
Moreover commercial success in America has been easier than anywhere
else in the world. Opportunities are numerous with the result that
competition has not been keen. Nothing has been so over praised or so
blindly praised as business success in this country. We may occasionally
elect men in public life to office upon false reputations, as we did
Vice-President Coolidge, crediting him with a firmness toward the Boston
police strikers which had been shown by a subordinate in his absence.
But at least the acts of officials are subject to popular scrutiny.
Behind success in business we may not look.
Take the case of a Middle Western corporation. Three quarters of its
profits came from a subsidiary. The history of the subsidiary is this:
The corporation came into possession of certain mineral lands through
the foreclosure of a mortgage. A company developing a product from the
mineral failed. The head of the corporation acquiring the property by
foreclosure thought this product of little value. A subordinate felt
that it could by a change of name and judicious advertising be widely
sold. He had great difficulty in persuading his employer but in the end
obtained the money to make his experiment, whose results fully justified
his judgment. The public seeking a business man for office would look no
further than at the success of the corporation, which would be proof
sufficient of the great talents of its head. Electing him they would not
obtain for public service the mind which made the money, even if it be
agreed that the talent for making money is a talent for public service.
And this case: A great Eastern trust acquired possession of a piece of
property in this way: It uses a mineral product not much found in this
country. Some Westerners had a deposit. They went to the Eastern trust,
which encouraged them and loaned them $10,000 for its development. They
then found that the trust was the only market for the mineral and that
it had no intention to buy. Ultimately this deposit passed to the trust
by foreclosure of the $10,000 mortgage. The trust thus obtaining
ownership, began mining and in the first year cleared $500,000 on its
$10,000 investment. The transaction in this instance was not the work of
a subordinate; it revealed, however, a peculiar talent in the head of
the corporation that would not be serviceable in public life.
To get down to names. Many business men entered the service of the
government during the war. Almost none of them left it with enhanced
reputations. Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, who served in the Treasury
Department, had little success, so the men who surrounded him felt. I am
not able to assess the causes of his failure. Perhaps he had assigned to
him an impossible task.
Similarly men who had contact with him while financing the Republican
campaign of 1916 were disappointed. After his service at Washington he
ceased to be head of a great Wall Street bank. What do these adverse
circumstances mean regarding Mr. Vanderlip's fitness to be, let us say,
Secretary of the Treasury? Precisely nothing, let us admit. And his
success for a number of years in banking, the large fortune he
accumulated, by the same reasoning, mean no more.
Mr. Vanderlip is one of our best known business men, yet what the public
knows about him is nothing. He was the president of a great bank and
amassed wealth. An old financial journalist, he has gift of speech and
writing, unusual in the business world. His agreeable personality made
him liked by editors. He achieved unusual publicity. Was his reputation
solidly based or was it newspaper made? The public does not know, cannot
know. I use his case by way of illustration. Perhaps he ought to be
President of the United States. But choosing a man for office on the
basis of his business success, even so well known a man as Mr.
Vanderlip, is plainly enough blind gambling.
We have in office now one of the great business men of the country. Mr.
Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, who is posed somewhat
uneasily upon what is, many say, the highest pile of wealth any one has
ever heaped up, except Mr. John D. Rockefeller. I say "somewhat
uneasily" because I have in mind Mr. Mellon emerging from a
Congressional hearing at the Capitol, flustered and uncomfortable,
turning to a subordinate and asking anxiously, "Well, did I make a good
impression?" What could a subordinate reply except, "Yes, Mr. Mellon,
you did very well."?
But Mr. Mellon does not make a good impression on the witness stand. If
he were unjustly accused of a crime he would hang himself by appearing
in his own defense, unless the jury sensed in his stammering hesitancy
not guilt but an honest inability to express himself.
Mr. Mellon is the shyest and most awkward man who ever rose to power. He
is unhappy before Congressional committees, before reporters in the
dreadful conferences which are the outward and visible evidence of our
democracy, at Cabinet meetings, where the fluent Mr. Hughes casts him
terribly in the shade.
At one such meeting the President dragged him forth from silence by
turning to him and asking him, "What has the Sphinx here got to say on
the subject." Thus impelled, the Secretary of the Treasury replied,
unconsciously in the words of Sir Roger de Coverley, "Well, Mr.
President, I think there is a good deal to be said on both sides."
If we may believe the psychologists, the great object of acquiring
wealth and power is the achievement of self-complacency. If it is, Mr.
Mellon has somehow missed it. You can not imagine him writing himself
down beside the others in the great American copy book and saying
seriously to the youth of the land, "Look at me, I worked always fifteen
minutes after the whistle blew and behold the result. Follow my
footsteps." No golden words issue from his mouth. Some unforgetable
personal measure of his own deserts, some standard peculiar to himself,
perhaps, refuses to be buried under the vast accumulations.
Were ever great abilities so tongue-tied as this? I ask this question
not to answer it. I merely hold Mr. Mellon up as the usually insoluble
riddle, the why of great business success. But granting that the real
Mr. Mellon is shown in the enormous fortune and not in the timid asking
of a subordinate, "Did I make a good impression?" does such shrinking,
such ill adaptation, on the stage of public life make a contribution to
the unending drama of self-government?
[Illustration: ANDREW W. MELLON, SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY]
I take it that behind these footlights which we call Washington, just as
behind the literal footlights, the actors, if there is to be any lifting
of us up, must play a part with which we can identify ourselves in our
imagination. He must be articulate. He must get across. Mr. Harding
does it admirably. You watch him and you realize that he is the oldest
of stage heroes, Everyman. You say to yourself unconsciously, "Only the
accident of seven million majority separates him from me." You are
lifted up. Ordinary flesh and blood can do this great thing.
Based on this desire to identify ourselves with greatness is our
familiar aphorism, "The office makes the man." All that is necessary is
the office to "make" the least of us.
Roosevelt played the part even better than Mr. Harding, "an ordinary man
raised to the nth power." He strutted to fill the eye. He was the
consummation of articulateness. The point is that self-government must
be dramatic or it does not carry along the self-governors.
Of course one must not overlook the fact that "the great silent man" is
a consolation to common inarticulateness and ineffectiveness, the
general belief that where there is a slow tongue profundity is found
being one of those pleasant things which we like to think about
ourselves--"we could and we would." But after all there is a sense of
pity about our kind attribution of hidden power to dullness. We are half
aware that we are compensating.
Anyway, even if the great business man is at home upon the stage, which
Mr. Mellon is not, the calling of him to office interrupts the drama of
self-government. We admit our failure and call in the gods from another
world. It is as I have said a staged receivership. We can not identify
ourselves with the hero. We are poor worms, not millionaires. We might
have the seven million majority but we could not also stand upon a pile
of seven million gold dollars. Government ceases to be human. It becomes
superhuman. And self-government must be human.
Of course, I exaggerate. Mr. Mellon coming from that other world is not
wholly without his human relations. I have alluded to his symbolizing
the wish-fulfilment of the inarticulate, and the inarticulate are many.
He does more. He fits admirably into what Mr. Walter Lippmann has called
in his new book one of our popular stereotypes. We demand a conflict
between reality and the stage. We like to see the masks pulled off our
actors. One of our best received traditions is that a man who has a
fight with the politicians has performed a great service. We like to see
our strutters strut in a little fear of us.
But Secretary Mellon's defeat of Representative Fordney, Senator Elkins,
and Elmer Dover in their efforts to fill his department with politicians
was not so much a sign of power as a measure of the difference between
Mr. Mellon's world and theirs.
Mr. Mellon comes into the Treasury from his bank. All he knows is
banking, not politics. If he went from the Mellon Bank to the National
City Bank of New York he would not discharge all the National City Bank
employees and bring in a lot of men who had never seen the inside of a
bank before, whom he did not know, who didn't speak the same language
that he did. It is only in politics that one finds such perfect faith in
man as man.
He goes to one young Democrat in the Department--this actually
happened--and he says, "Young man, I like your work. I want you to stay
with me," "Ah, but, Mr. Mellon, I can't," plead this Democrat, "You
really can't do things that way. It is not done. You will have all the
Republican politicians about your ears."
But it was not a sense of power in Mr. Mellon that made him thus defy
the conventions. It was merely the instinct of self-protection. He could
not live in the atmosphere of politics. He had to do things as he always
had done them. The Gods coming down from high Olympus among the sons and
daughters of men were probably never as much at ease as the Greeks made
them out to be.
With his millions behind him Mr. Mellon was a solid object in his
conflict with the politicians. Without them one does not know what would
have happened between him and Mr. Fordney, Mr. Elkins, and Mr. Dover.
What is a good Secretary of the Treasury? We have a stereotype about
that, too, one slowly and painfully formed. A good Secretary of the
Treasury is one who has seen the inside of a bank, who has read the
books on finance and knows the rules. Originally our Secretaries of the
Treasury were amateurs, like our generals who beat ploughshares into
swords. When one got into trouble, he boarded the Congressional Limited
for New York and saw Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan came out of his bank holding
the safety of the nation in his hands, exhibiting it to reporters who
wrote all about it, assuring the public.
At length it was decided to keep the safety of the nation at Washington.
And our Secretaries of the Treasury tended to become professional. The
young men who tell us whether we have a good Secretary of the Treasury
or not are the financial writers of the newspapers. The Secretary acts.
The young men look in the books and see that he has conformed to the
rules. When he has he leaves nothing to be desired as Secretary.
Mr. Mellon's relation to Alexander Hamilton is the same as Marshal
Foch's relation to Napoleon; one knew war from his own head, the other
knows it from the teachers. Mr. Mellon's administration is not inspired.
In the greatest financial crisis in our history he has no constructive
suggestion to make. You would hardly know that Secretary Houston was
gone and Mr. Mellon had come. And there is an explanation for this
continuity, beside that of the rule books. The hard work of the
Department has been done under both administrations by Assistant
Secretary S. P. Gilbert, for Mr. Mellon has the successful man's habit
of leaning heavily upon an able and industrious subordinate. Mr. Gilbert
is an ambitious young lawyer who has mastered the books and who works 18
hours a day. The voice is the voice of Mellon but the hand is the hand
of Gilbert.
I have analyzed Mr. Mellon at Washington although only a small fraction
of his career is involved and although he operates in the difficult
circumstances of an unknown and unfavorable environment. But he is
perceptible in Washington, he does appear before Congressional
Committees and at newspaper conferences. You can study the Gilberts who
surround him. You can estimate the prepossessions that enter into our
judgment of him. You can measure him against the standard of public
life.
In Pittsburg he is more remote. He is hedged about with the secrecy of
business. He is to be seen only through the golden aura of a great
fortune, sitting shy and awkward upon an eminence, the product of forces
and personalities which can only be guessed at.
He was the son of a banker and inherited a considerable fortune. He
operated in a city which expanded fabulously in the course of his
lifetime. If he is shy and unbusiness-worldly, he has a brother who has
that force of personality which we usually associate with fitness for
life. His bank was the chosen instrument of Henry C. Frick, one of the
pioneer demigods, who could make the business reputations of men who
proved adaptable to his uses.
Thus into the result there enters the power of Frick, the thrust upward
of Pittsburg, an industrial volcano, the associated personality of the
other Mellon. You have to give a name to all this combination of
favoring circumstances and favoring personalities and names are usually
given arbitrarily. The name given in this case is Andrew W. Mellon. But
how much of it is Andrew W. Mellon and how much of it is Pittsburg, how
much of it Frick, how much of it brother Mellon, an electorate seeking a
business man for office can not stop to inquire and can not learn if it
does inquire.
If the people elect a man like Mr. Mellon to office they do not enlist
in the public service the combination of persons and forces which is
known by his name. Or if he is all that he seems to be, measured by his
great fortune, perhaps they get him after he has spent his force or
after his head is turned by success, or at any rate they put him into an
unfamiliar milieu and subject him to that corrupting temptation, the
desire for a second term or for a higher office.
And to go back to what I have said before, they make self-government go
into bankruptcy and ask for a receiver.
The great business-man President is just a romantic development of the
great business-man illusion.